As a three-year(2017-2019) research project, the purpose of the study is to provide policy implication for successful reentry of youth offenders by assessing the current juvenile correctional system and conducting empirical analyses with longitudinal data. During the first year of the project we focused on uating the current juvenile justice system and programs including roles of juvenile justice institutions in terms of reentry, and also conducting survey on the perception and attitude of correctional officers and probationers toward juvenile reentry. During the second year of the project we shifted our focus from the system to empirical analyses in order to better understand youth offenders' changes in their perception, attitude, and behavior during the process of reentry. Prior researchers tend to heavily emphasize recidivism as a measure of successful reentry and examine correlates of recidivism, while they do not pay enough attention to the process of reentry including positive and/or negative progress until recidivism. That is, prior research seem to understand reentry of juvenile offenders from the perspective of criminal justice, instead of youth welfare perspective, which provides us with an opportunity of understanding reentry issues from comprehensive approaches beyond recidivism. Therefore, the current study applies youth welfare perspective to explain reentry issues. To this end, scholars from diverse research areas, such as criminology, sociology, psychology, and education worked together in analyzing data, explaining the results, and providing implication.
We start to collecting juvenile offenders' data who are at juvenile training schools with panel data design to track their changes in perception, attitude, and behavior. Different from panel design with people in community, we require to collaborate with officers at juvenile correctional facilities and at the juvenile justice division to get information of juvenile inmates such as their dispositions and starting/ending dates which influence research design. In addition, we collect juvenile offenders data who get probation as a comparison group. For the first wave of the data we conducted survey with 533 juvenile inmates at residential facilities and 463 juvenile offenders on probation. First, we compared the inmates group to probationers group in reentry factors(positive/negative changes in perception/emotion and behavior) and protective/risk factors of reentry (intra/inter personal factors and community factors), and second we divided the whole sample into 4 groups (male inmates, female inmates, male probationers, female probationers) and compared them in reentry factors and protective/risk factors of reentry. According to the results, the youth at residential facilities were worse in intra and inter personal factors among protective/risk factors of reentry and also in reentry factors(both positive and negative factors). In particular, female inmates were the most vulnerable among the four groups. The results of regression analyses between protective/risk factors and reentry factors show that most protective and risk factors influenced perception/emotion factors among positive reentry factors, while parental attachment, religiosity, and moral belief affected behavioral factors of positive reentry. Perception and emotion factors of negative reentry were influenced by self-control, strain, religiosity, moral belief, labeling, and community security level, while behavioral factors of negative reentry were affected by most protective and risk factors. In addition, we conducted network analyses to explore juvenile offenders' relationships with others. The results showed that juvenile inmates had stronger affiliation with friends instead of adults than probationers. Also, the type of relationship(e.g.relationship with friend or family members) influenced network structure only for juvenile inmates, but not for juvenile probationers.
Considering providing juvenile offenders with customized reentry programs to maximize the effectiveness of the programs, it is really important to examine if heterogeneous subgroups really exist in both inmates and probationers groups, and if so, how many subgroups exist in each group. Using the protective/risk factors and reentry factors as well as Youth Self Report(a psychological assessment tool), we conducted latent profile analyses. According to the results, three subgroups appeared in both groups. The first group was named stable group due to no symptom of internalizing and externalizing problem; the second group was named externalizing group due to symptoms of externalizing problems, while the last group was named mixed-unstable group due to symptoms of both externalizing and internalizing problems. Among the juvenile inmates group 46.2% were included in the externalizing group, 18.1% were in the stable group, and 35.7% were in the mixed-unstable group, while the probationers group was composed of 51.4% of the externalizing group, 37.6% of the stable group, and 9.9% of the mixed-unstable group. That is, there were more juveniles in the inmates group who exhibited symptoms of externalizing and internalizing problems than the probationers group. The results also showed that there were much more juveniles who had symptoms of internalizing and externalizing problems among the probationers group than expected.
We also uated the effectiveness of the reentry program developed in the first year. To uate this program juveniles at one male and one female residential facilities participated in the program. Among the 30 juveniles 15 were assigned to the experimental group who participated in the program and the rest 15 were assigned to the control group as a comparison group. Pre and post tests were used to examine the program effectiveness. We also conducted in-depth interview with the youth in the experimental group, the staff involved in the program, and the program leaders, The effectiveness of the program was uated with two measures. The first was called measurement indicators which include seven areas, such as understanding myself, communication skills, social interactions, financial management skills, career preparation(academy and job), collecting information of resources after reentry. The second was named major indicators which include self-esteem, resilience, self-regulation, career efficacy, understanding reentry services in community, satisfaction with the program. The results found higher increase in psycho-social abilities(i.e. decrease in aggression, increase in both career efficacy and understanding reentry services in community) of the youth in the experimental group than those in the control group after controlling for the pre-scores of the indicators. In addition, the youth in the experimental group showed higher satisfaction with the program contents than those in the control group. According to the results of the in-depth interview, the youth involved in the program were quite satisfied with getting useful information of reentry, better understanding themselves within the relationships with others, and preparing for the reentry step-by-step. These results imply that the program helps the youth develop psycho-social abilities.
Based on the results of the analyses aforementioned, we suggest the followings. First of all, the juvenile correctional facilities should provide more intensive reentry services for female inmates, individualized reentry program based on the youth's relationship with others, mental services for the youth with mental issues, and intervention program focusing on recovering family strengths. Secondly, the juvenile probation office need to reuate their classification system and reentry services and programs, and also should work more closely with juvenile residential facilities in order to make the transition from residential facilities to probation and community more smooth. Thirdly, the juvenile justice system should pay more attention to juvenile offenders' reentry issues and provide more financial and human resources to develop and run evidence-based reentry programs.